In a small city in West Alabama, Phil Neel was born in Sumter County in 1927. At 18, he signed up with the Navy and served our country. After the Navy, Phil was hired as a sports artist at the Birmingham Post-Herald and Birmingham News for a total of 34 years. He also did freelance work for schools all over the Southeast. He continued his artwork after retiring from his newspaper career.
The original creator of Auburn's famous mascot, Aubie, Phil Neel was quickly known throughout the Southeast for his famous and popular program covers. His first cover appeared on the Auburn vs. Hardin-Simmons football program cover on October 3, 1959. Aubie continued to appear on the Auburn program covers for 18 years and had a few special editions. If you have a copy of the 1959 Hardin-Simmons program, you have a rare Auburn football collectible that is hot as they get! They even wrote a book about Phil Neel and all of his covers over the 18+ years with Auburn University.
Neel spoke of Aubie, his most famous creation, in terms of detached endearment, as a grandparent quietly proud of a grandchild’s achievements. “Of course, I drew him and I spent a lot of hours working on it and stuff like that,” according to Neel. “But I never really thought I was creating anything unique exactly. I almost feel like Aubie was a real entity that kind of grew up on his own.”
AuburnSource main collection of Auburn football programs centers around every Phil Neel program that we can get our hands on. The collection of Aubie program covers can be viewed as a sort of biography. AuburnSource keeps all of the Phil Neel programs in stock cataloged chronologically and constantly searches for more! It simply was a classic time over those 18 years Phil Neel designed the front covers. Everyone couldn't wait to see the next program and how Phil would set up the opposing mascot against the mighty Aubie.
For his part, Neel never really knew the nostalgia-fueled appetite for his work existed until 2006 when former Auburn Athletics Director David Housel approached him with the idea of publishing a collection of his covers. The book, today, is extremely hard to find and is a top collectors piece in of itself.
“I know that the collectors are really having a field day with it and that’s great,” Neel said. “I’m not a collector myself. I don’t even have many of the programs.”
But we do, thanks in large part to one collector in particular that has had more like a field decade, Clyde Kingry. He has sent us scans of his collection. He has done the world a favor.
We start with the program for the 1959 Hardin-Simmons game played in Cliff Hare Stadium on Oct. 3, 1959. It was Aubie’s first appearance on an Auburn “Official Program.” And he came out fulfilling the highest expectations.
“It started off like he was going to eat up everybody the first two or three times (he appeared on the program) as a wild tiger, but pretty soon, it was that he would just try to trick people,” Neel said.
Phil Neel passed away on Wednesday July 25, 2012 at the age of 84 after a long battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
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